There’s a story most high-achievers live by.
It goes something like this:
Work hard. Push through. Overcome the odds. Grow stronger through suffering. Win something. Repeat.
The Hero’s Journey.
Joseph Campbell named it decades ago. Hollywood turned it into a formula. Self-help culture turned it into religion.
And if you’ve ever felt like life is a constant quest— that you must do more or be more before you can rest— you’ve probably been living in this story.
So have I.
And for a while, it works.
The hero rises. He learns to fight. He learns to perform. He wins the prize.
But then something strange happens.
One day, he looks around and realizes… he doesn’t know why he’s still fighting.
Or worse— He starts to wonder if the thing he’s been trying to defeat was never outside of him to begin with.
That’s when the Hero’s Journey starts to fall apart.
Not because it was wrong. But because it was never meant to carry us all the way home.
For many years, I lived inside the heroic myth.
In my twenties, I was chasing academic achievement. In my thirties, I was chasing status, women, luxury. And for a time, I got all of it.
But under the surface, if I stayed still long enough to notice it, I still felt empty.
Life still felt hollow.
No matter how much I accomplished, it never felt like enough.
Each win reset the goalpost. Each high wore off faster than the one before.
On the outside, things looked great. On the inside, I was quietly burning out.
The old strategy—work harder, push through, achieve more— just wasn’t working anymore.
And here’s the part no one tells you:
The more you succeed within the Hero’s Journey, the harder it becomes to leave it.
Because your whole identity gets wrapped up in the fight. In the performance. In the story that says: You are only as good as your last victory.
So what comes after the Hero’s Journey?
What happens when the fighting no longer makes sense? When the dragon disappears? When the treasure doesn’t satisfy you anymore?
This is the moment where another path opens— one that most people never hear about.
It’s older. Quieter. Harder to sell in a headline.
I call it The Sage’s Journey.
The Sage’s Journey doesn’t begin with a challenge. It begins with a whisper.
A subtle ache. A soft discontent.
Nothing’s wrong exactly. But something’s missing.
You start to feel that your success came at a cost.
Not because you failed— but because you won the wrong battle.
You start to feel tired. But not just physically.
Emotionally.
A kind of weariness that no nap can fix.
That’s the 1st phase of the Sage’s Journey: The Call to Stillness.
No dragons to slay. Just a question:
What if I stopped running?
From there, the Sage doesn’t go outward. He turns inward.
This is the 2nd phase: The Descent Inward.
Instead of chasing purpose, he starts listening. Instead of powering through, he gets quiet.
And he begins to hear the voices inside him— the scared ones, the angry ones, the parts of him that got pushed aside so he could perform for the world.
This is where the real work begins.
The Sage doesn’t try to conquer these parts. He learns to sit with them. To understand them. To let them speak.
It’s messy. It’s slow. It’s not something you can show off on social media.
But it leads somewhere deeper than performance ever could.
Eventually, the noise starts to settle.
The Sage begins to move differently.
Not for show. Not to win.
Just… in alignment.
This is The Path of Cultivation.
No more chasing. No more proving.
Just a quiet practice of returning to what’s true.
In Daoism, this is wu wei—effortless action. In Buddhism, it’s no-self. In Confucianism, it’s self-cultivation.
In daily life, it’s the ability to lead a meeting, hold a child, or walk alone in a park… without needing to be anywhere else.
Then comes something most heroes never imagine: The Return Without Ego.
The Sage returns to the world. But not to be validated. Not to be admired. Not to be followed.
He comes back quietly.
People feel something different around him, but they can’t explain it.
He doesn’t preach. He doesn’t try to persuade others.
He just walks through the world with less fear and self-centeredness and more courage, compassion, and connection.
This is de—a kind of grounded power that doesn’t seek attention, but naturally inspires trust.
It’s the kind of presence that lets others breathe easier without knowing why.
And finally… there’s the last phase.
The Joy of Emptiness.
This is where the Sage laughs. Not because he’s won. But because he’s stopped needing to win.
He returns to the marketplace with open hands and a lightness that comes from forgetting himself.
Zhuangzi called this “forgetting the self.” C.S. Lewis said, “No one who bothers about originality will ever be original. But if you simply try to tell the truth, you will—nine times out of ten—become original without ever having noticed it.”
True joy doesn’t come from winning. It comes from no longer needing to measure yourself.
That’s what makes the Sage free.
So if you’ve been chasing dragons… And those dragons don’t seem to fight back anymore…
If you’ve won some battles but still feel tired…
If you’ve followed the Hero’s Journey as far as it can go…
Then maybe what you need isn’t more armor. Maybe it’s a place to set the sword down.
The Hero’s Journey brought you here. The Sage’s Journey can take you further.
But only if you’re willing to stop and listen to the part of you that’s been waiting this whole time.
I just released a full podcast episode on this: 🎧 “Why the Sage’s Journey Fulfills You When the Hero’s Journey Stops Making Sense” 🔗
If it speaks to you, pass it on. There are a lot of people still stuck in the fight— and they don’t know there’s another path.
— David Tian, Ph.D. Beyond Success: Psychology & Philosophy for Achievers
0 Comments